Suspicious items on the SkyTrain tracks stop the trains and fray the nerves of travelers.

Transit officers will continue to comb TransLink stations and lines for signs of danger this week after two bomb scares along SkyTrain routes Friday.

“We are continuing with our sweeps of all of the stations, bus loops and terminals,” said Transit police spokeswoman Anne Drennan on Sunday. “We are also riding the trains wherever possible, doing sweeps of all of the buses and cars.”

Riders can expect to see more Transit police and additional security and station attendants in SkyTrain stations and trains for the first half of this week, she said.

“This is to assist in site security, site sweeps and also to reassure passengers that we’re taking this very seriously and that their safety is our Number 1 priority.”

On Friday afternoon, a SkyTrain passenger spotted a makeshift bomb on the Expo Line in Surrey. Later, a station attendant at Metrotown Station in Burnaby raised an alarm over a piece of drainage pipe, which turned out to be harmless.

Drennan said the continuing search for more explosives would cover all 134 kilometres of track along the Expo, Millennium and Canada lines as well as 57 SkyTrain stations, three dedicated bridges and three tunnels. “And that just deals with the trains, so you can imagine that sweeping all of these areas is extremely time consuming and resource draining.”

A dozen Transit crime reduction officers are spearheading the investigation into the Surrey incident in collaboration with the RCMP and its Integrated National Security Enforcement Team, Drennan said.

“Our officers have continued with the canvassing of businesses and residents in the area where the explosive device was found on Friday afternoon.”

They have also carried out a ground search of parts of Surrey with bomb-sniffing dogs and police to look for possible evidence, and are reviewing video cameras from several SkyTrain stations and businesses all around the Surrey stations, she said. “But as of yet we’ve discovered nothing of value.”

Investigators still don’t know how the device got on the tracks or who put it there, but Drennan said technicians quickly determined it was dangerous.

Around 2 p.m. Friday, Surrey RCMP’s explosives unit was dispatched to a section of the Expo Line after a passenger reported seeing a suspicious red canister on the line midway between the Scott Road and Gateway stations.

When the unit arrived, they found three empty tanks strapped to a small red canister, with straps and wires sticking out of the bundle.

“When you looked down on the device you could see what appeared to be some sort of red canister; it looked like possibly a fire extinguisher or an oxygen tank,” Drennan said.

The unit removed the entire device in an explosive safe container and dismantled it, keeping the tanks for forensic testing and evidence, Drennan said. The device itself was blown up for safety reasons. Drennan said investigators have not released what type of explosive material was used in the bomb.

There are no suspects at this point in what was the first explosive device ever found on TransLink property, Drennan said.

“There’s still the strong possibility that it was thrown there from the hillside next to the track area,” she said, noting investigators are still trying to narrow down the time the device was placed on the tracks.

She said sensors installed on the guideways beside the rails did not detect the nearby bomb. Guideways, built to seismic standards in the 1990s and made of reinforced concrete and steel, would have mitigated the effect of the blast had the bomb gone off, she said.

‘They’re built to withstand a lot of trauma, so the estimation by the bomb techs was that it wouldn’t have brought down the guideway, and that there wouldn’t have been debris from the guideway that would have fallen down below.”

Nonetheless, the track would have been significantly damaged, as would a train car moving past, she added.

The specific degree of damage to infrastructure or people is difficult to guess, said Drennan. “Who’s to say, that’s all speculative.”

Transit police carry out regular sweeps of the rail lines, and had gone over the area on Halloween, roughly 48 hours before the device was spotted.

Investigators have also been looking to social media for clues as to who was behind the makeshift bomb, which had a fuse and could potentially have been detonated manually or electronically.

“We have been ... looking for any potential threats or bragging that may have gone on about someone who might take some pride in what happened the other day,” Drennan said. “But as of yet we’ve come up with nothing.”

Transit police have received several tips from the public that investigators are following up on, she added.

Investigators are tentatively ruling out the possibility of terrorism as a motive behind the bomb placement: “To date, we have uncovered nothing that would indicate this is anything other than a localized incident.

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Police and transit security presence at Broadway Skytrain Station in Vancouver, November 5, 2012. The increased security follows an incident where a pipe bomb was found on the tracks in Surrey last week.

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